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Menu for a Party of Eight

A clear vegetable consommé with thinly sliced carrots, turnips, leeks, onions, celery, lettuce, and sorrel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Menu for a Party of Eight

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut the vegetables into thin strips, no more than ⅛ inch across and 1 inch long.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the vegetables, sugar, pepper, and salt.

  3. Toss the vegetables lightly on the fire for about 5 minutes until they slightly color.

Hold and serve

  1. Cover the vegetables with a little gravy from the consommé and remove excess grease.

  2. Keep the cooked vegetables warm in the gravy until serving.

  3. Just before serving, add the vegetables to the consommé with shredded lettuce and sorrel, bring to a boil, skim, and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the vegetables and adds richness and a mellow flavor as they cook.
Carrots
Provide sweetness and color, and give the consommé body as a vegetable garnish.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like aroma and flavor to the finished broth.
Sorrel
Adds a bright, lemony acidity to the finished consommé.

The step that matters

Lightly coloring the vegetables. Tossing them only briefly over heat softens and slightly browns them, building flavor without cooking them through. Overcooking makes them mushy and can cloud the clear consommé when they are added back.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, pepper, carrot, turnip, leek, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, pepper, carrot, turnip, leek, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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